will pull ups make you stronger ?
Will pull ups make you stronger?
The short answer is yes, pull ups can absolutely make you stronger, no matter your age, size, or fitness level.
The long answer is that doing pull ups is not a guarantee of more strength. To get stronger with pull ups, you have to get stronger at pull ups.
First, let us dive into the science a bit.
Will Pull ups Make you Stronger? Muscle and Strength Adaptations
Pull ups activate primarily the muscles of the back and biceps, including:
The Latissimus Dorsi Muscles
The bicep brachii muscles
The muscles of the forearm– brachialis and brachioradialis
The Rhomboids
The Lower Trapezius Muscles
Teres Major
Levator Scapulae (side of the neck)
The Posterior Deltoids (rear delts)
Smaller contribution from the tricep muscles (assist in shoulder adduction), erector spinae (spinal stabilizer muscles) and rectus abdominus (abdominal muscles).
The pull up will train those muscles to increase in size and strength.
Will Pull ups Make you Stronger? Local Adaptations
Muscle and strength adaptations are site specific, meaning activating the lat muscles won’t have much direct effect on the strength of the quadricep muscles. To gain strength in a specific body part(s), you have to train that muscle group to become stronger.
That said, the pull up is an excellent exercise to stress adaptation in the upper body muscles mentioned above.
As long as you are gaining muscle in your upper body, pull ups should also give you the potential to lift more weight with similar exercises.
Will Pull ups Make your Stronger? Movement Pattern Specificity
Strength adaptations are movement pattern specific.
While having more muscle gives you the potential to lift more weight in any specific movement pattern, you must practice that movement pattern to get stronger at it. Strength is a skill and you must perfect the pull up so your body can perform it more efficiently.
The pull up is no different. Training the pull up will make you stronger at pull ups.
Improving your pull ups will give you the potential to lift more weight with similar movement patterns and with exercises stressing similar muscle groups.
Will Pull ups Make you Stronger? Indirect Effects
Strengthening the lats with pull ups may have an indirect effect on the strength of your other muscle groups.
The lats and upper back play a key role in many of the big lifts. They help you stabilize in the bench press, conventional and sumo deadlift, barbell squat, snatch, clean and jerk, and several other compound lifts.
Strengthening your upper back and lats with pull ups may help you handle more weight on bench press by stabilizing your shoulder joints. Stronger lats may help you better stabilize your spine during deadlifts and generate more power in the Snatch or Clean and Jerk.
Your lats and upper back are indeed active during the bench press.
So pull ups may indeed help you build full body strength. They might allow you to get stronger at other compound movements that stress different or multiple muscle groups.
Will pull ups make you Stronger? Pull ups for balanced upper body development
The pull up is a vertical upper body pulling exercise.
This will allow more balanced stress and development of the upper body pushing and pulling exercises. Balanced development and strength will allow for more optimal movement patterns and postural alignment. This can help to reduce stress on the shoulder joints.
Included in a balanced training program, pull ups can help you prevent injuries to the shoulder girdle. If you can reduce your risk of injury you can train productively for longer. Reaching your strength potential requires that you stay mostly healthy. If you are always so battered and beat up that you can’t train, you won’t make strength progress.
Will Pull ups Make you Stronger? Advice for Beginners
Doing pull ups will help beginners get stronger. Beginners can use pretty low training intensities and still get stronger.
You won’t need to lift really heavy weights or follow a specialized program.
You can simply begin a basic plan including pull ups and other strength exercises at very low intensities and still see strength progress.
Just start training the pull up and other bread-and-butter movements and expect to still get a lot stronger over time.
Will Pull ups Make you Stronger? Even Beginners Need Progressive Overload
Even though you can work at a low intensity, you will still need to improve your pull up performance over time to get stronger. You will still need to progress to get stronger.
Aim to get a bit better each week by doing more sets, more reps, or decreasing your assistance just a little bit. Over time little improvement will have big payoffs.
Will Pull ups Make you Stronger? Advice for Intermediates and Advanced Trainees
As you move out of the beginner phase with the pull up, you will have to work at relatively higher intensities to continue gaining strength.
Once you get past your beginner gains in the pull up, you won’t build much strength working in the 15-20 rep range anymore. You can still probably build size and muscular endurance working in this rep range, but to get stronger, you will have to work with heavier loads.
Intermediates and advanced trainees can build muscle and strength with sets of 8 to 12 repetitions. Very advanced trainees will have to work with 3-8 reps per set to gain more strength.
Sample pull up set/rep schemes for intermediate/advanced Pull up trainees:
3 x 3 @ 90 % 1RM Pull up (Hang from a pull up bar with 90 percent of the weight you can pull up for just 1 rep)
5 x 5 @ 80 % 1RM Pull up
6 x 3 @ 85-87.5 % 1RM Pull up
3 x 8 reps @ 60 percent 1RM Pull up
Will Pull ups Make you Stronger? Sample 4 Week Programs
1st Week: 5 x 3 pull ups with 10 lb additional weight
2nd Week: 5 x 3 pull ups with 12.5 lb additional weight
3rd Week: 5 x 3 pull ups with 15 lb additional weight
4th Week: 5 x 3 pull ups with 17.5 lb additional weight.
Your strength gains probably won’t be this linear. However, you should be adding weight, reps, or sets or progressing somehow over time in order to get stronger at pull ups and in general.
Will Pull ups Make you Stronger? Confidence and Strength
Once you are able to do pull ups, your confidence levels sky-rocket.
You begin to view yourself as a “Strong” person instead of a weak one.
This subtle change in your confidence will allow you to conquer more physical challenges and to achieve a level of strength you never thought possible.
Once you can do pull ups, you will realize that you can surpass any limit you once believed you could not achieve. While you may have believed a double bodyweight squat or deadlift, a 1.5x bodyweight bench press, or a bodyweight overhead press were impossible, now you believe you can get there with solid effort and time.
You see, once you can do pull ups, you believe you can do anything. 🙂
And that attitude will help you build your strongest self.
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